The Demise of Texts and Their Manuscripts in the Medieval West
2 Ideological Destruction – Erasure of Compromi- Compromi-sing Evidence
Of course, the destruction perpetrated by the Nazi regime of the 1930s was of a differ-ent nature than the destruction caused by the Allied bombings. The former was delib-erate for ideological reasons: the objective was to eliminate ideas that went against the party doctrine and writings identified as part of a subculture unworthy of existence.
This form of censorship aims to shut down divergent views or elements from the past that do not serve the authority’s purpose. Destructions represent also a form of psy-chological warfare.18 For example, in the Baltic States, history books were destroyed
14 UNESCO 1996, 10–20.
15 Báez 2008, 67; UNESCO 1996, 10–12.
16 Kirkpatrick 2013.
17 Vuilleumier 2015a, 52–54.
18 Taber 1977.
and libraries were purged by Russian troops in 1940.19 In Czechoslovakia, most librar-ies saw their collections either destroyed or dispersed, and many rare volumes such as the Slavata Bible disappeared during the war. The total number of books, manuscripts and incunabula lost by Czechoslovakia is estimated at nearly 2 million.20
Following the invasion of Poland, the Nazis formed burning detachments (Brenn-kommandos) to torch synagogues and Jewish books. The Great Talmudic Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Lublin was burned down, and the few thousand books that survived were taken to Berlin, where they were destroyed during the bomb-ings. Aside from these targeted eliminations, nearly all of Poland’s libraries, archives, and museums were ravaged. UNESCO estimated that, of the 22.5 million volumes con-tained in Polish libraries, 15 million were deliberately destroyed.21 Interestingly, the surviving books included a collection of freemasonry materials from Krakow that was hidden for years in a castle cellar.22
These wilful destructions cannot be compared to those that happened during the bombings of Germany. Aside from Dresden, the losses were part of global military operations where the survival of books was not a priority. The two causes were dif-ferent, but had the same end result. One case was a clear and deliberate attempt at censorship; the other was what we now call “collateral damage”.
Ideological and doctrinal destructions are closely associated with the 20th century.
One of the last examples to occur in Europe was in 1984, when a group of extreme-left militants vandalised part of the library of the Dutch South African Society in Amster-dam and threw into the canals books that they considered to be part of an imperialist agenda.23 There is also the anecdotal, but very real, bonfire of Harry Potter-books that was organised in 2001 by a New Mexico pastor who called them “an abomination to God”.24 Elsewhere, Taliban attacks on libraries in Kabul in 1998 led to the elimination of 55,000 rare volumes.25 More recently, in 2013, Islamists destroyed part of the man-uscripts of Timbuktu’s main library. Finally, thousands of books in Mosul have been cremated by Isis (or Da’esh).26
To be sure, similar destructions happened in earlier times, as is witnessed for example by the burning of the Library of Congress by British troops in 1814, which happened in retaliation for an American attack on the library of York the previous year.27 In the 19th century and before, the reasons for the majority of burnings were
19 Baechler 2012.
20 Marès 2005.
21 Baechler 2012, 87.
22 Vuilleumier 2015b.
23 UNESCO 1996, 19.
24 Yates 2001.
25 International Federation for Human Rights 2012, 41.
26 Le Point. Culture 2015; Le Nouvel Observateur 2015.
27 Latimer 2007.
either political (to cover up morally questionable activities) or strategic (to destroy sources of knowledge). Documents pertaining to the English expeditions to New-foundland and the decimation of the Beothuk population, a people that was declared extinct in 1829, did not survive this political censorship.28 Neither did a great number of documents about the colonisation of Australia and the treatment of its Aboriginal people. However, despite the fact that the cultural and artistic products of dominated ethnic groups were often pillaged and taken to Europe, they were never subject to a deliberate annihilation as designed and executed by the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century. The purposeful and systematic destruction of entire collections of writings is often accompanied by the extermination of people. While these events are linked to wars, they do not necessarily imply military operations: an example of this is the methodical planning of assassinations by fascist regimes. In former centu-ries, armed conflicts typically involved only soldiers and therefore had limited conse-quences on populations and written culture.
The targeted elimination of documents, aimed at protecting specific interests, inevitably leads to a medium-term memory loss of events or periods of time. This col-lective amnesia goes unnoticed, and when research sheds light upon it, there can be a sense of surprise and unease that creates a taboo.29 Switzerland is a good point in case. Its history during World War II had been very little studied until the end of the 20th century, and the few studies that did exist extended into the 1990s and addressed matters mostly unrelated to sensitive issues such as the policy on refugees, the closure of borders, the unclaimed assets in banks and the development of Aryan ideas during the war. Obviously, these issues put Switzerland in an awkward position, which is why they were deliberately overlooked during the second half of the 20th century. Del-icate questions were avoided in textbooks and a certain number of documents were eliminated in both administrative units and archives. A phenomenon highlighted by the Carl Ludwig’s 1957 report on the Swiss refugee policy, which was based on first-hand accounts and sources and contained encrypted data, remains hard to find to this day because no reprint was ever allowed by the federal authorities. The “truth”
about that period waited until the 1996 Bergier Commission, a five-year inquiry made by university professors.30 Unsurprisingly, one of the report’s first observations con-cerned the number of documents that had been destroyed.31 The political and medi-atic impact of the Bergier Report lead to a variety of publications that either supported its findings or rejected them. The controversy became as great as the taboo that these issues had become for a neutral country.32
28 Vuilleumier et al. 2016; Todorov 1998.
29 Bédarida 1994; Fassin / Rechtman 2011; Zelis 2005.
30 https://www.uek.ch/fr/schlussbericht/synthese / SBfzus.pdf (last accessed: 24. 02. 2018).
31 Commission Indépendante d’Experts: Suisse – Seconde Guerre mondiale 2002.
32 Boschetti 2004; Bridel 2009.
With the same idea, a recent case in 2018 has created a scandal among Swiss his-torians with the disappearance of archives concerning the swiss secret army created during the Cold War, the P26, revealed in 1990. The investigation conducted then had highlighted the close relationship with the British MI-6 and certainly led to the murder of Herbert Alboth, one of the leaders of the P26.33 But, a part of the archives of this organization had been forbidden to researchers, the part that has just disap-peared. The President of the Swiss Society of History and director of the Diplomatic Documents Research Center (Dodis), Sacha Zala, sounded the alarm in “Der Bund”
on 8 February 2018, in an article entitled: “In den Bundesämtern gilt das Prinzip: In dubio pro Zensur”. The historian evoked the disappearance of the archives of the P26 of the Department of Defense.34 A parliamentary inquiry was to be opened and is still ongoing!
A similar phenomenon is to be expected in relation to another particularly sensi-tive issue that is equally taboo: administrasensi-tive detention, especially the internment of children. For a hundred years, Switzerland used administrative detention in parallel with the judicial system. Alcoholics were targeted for sanitary and moral reasons in the beginning of the 20th century, later on, the same method was applied in the case of handicapped people, allegedly for their own protection, as well as orphans, chil-dren whose fathers were alcoholic, and “promiscuous” girls.35 Some of these intern-ments were, according to the official jargon, made for “medical reasons”, while these practices reflect the attitudes of their own times, it sometimes seems that they have not been perceived as scandalising until the 21st century. However, the internment of minors, which included the forced separation of Yenish children from their families, but also the forcible sterilisation of them, has recently created a great sense of unease that finally ended up bringing these matters before the courts, where financial com-pensations are now awarded for moral prejudice by the people, once victims of these arbitrary decisions.36
The burden of proof, however, still rests with the victims. This highlights the effect of the destruction of documents that constitute fundamental evidence to determine responsibility. Both in Switzerland and abroad, these written sources are part of the arguments presented in court. Their absence always creates doubts and grey areas.
33 Vuilleumier 2018.
34 Lenz / Häfliger 2018.
35 Collaud 2013.
36 Vuilleumier (forthcoming).